Resources and Knowledge for the Small Business CEO

The Top Three Benefits from Using Business Intelligence Software

Let’s face it, you don’t have time to manage and sort all of your company/department data with hours of manual labor. Thankfully, there’s business intelligence software that can do the hard work for you with just a few clicks!

What Can Business Intelligence Do?

The goal of business intelligence is to better assist you in making more informed decisions on behalf of the company. Here are just some of the benefits:

You’ll see inside the minds of your customers and figure out what behavior they’re following, what they’re buying and when they’re buying it.

Identify any upsell or cross-sell opportunities that may exist.

Error free analysis reports.

Eliminate the need to guess or make accurate predictions of the future.

The list of benefits from using business intelligence is endless, but we’re going to go over some of the top three benefits and how they could help you.

#1 – Superior Marketing Analytics

Running a successful business isn’t only about selling a product that people want but you have to understand why those people are buying those products as well. What time of the year do people spend the most money on your particular services or product? Discovering buyer trends is a vital tool that’s needed in every company’s arsenal.

How many people are coming to your website, where are they going, how long are they staying, what are they doing, etc? These are all important questions you should know the answer to! If you don’t, you’re losing out on a huge potential market.

#2 – Inventories and Financial Monitoring

Do you think that super retail giants like Wal-Mart and the likes keep all of their files by hand? They have an array of business intelligence software programs in place to do all of that tidy work for them and to maintain dead on accuracy. A company that receives and sells millions of products worldwide on a daily basis needs to maintain complete accuracy to ensure financial records are correct.

Not only that, but if you run any e-mail campaigns to your customers, you can keep track of the marketing side of your finances as well. You can determine how many people are reading the e-mails you send out, how many people are becoming customers from those e-mails and your cost versus earnings.

#3 – Accurate Data and Reports

If you’ve ever had to keep multiple financial records or employment records by hand, then you might notice the huge pile of clusters that are your sensitive data files. Business intelligence eliminates the need to have all of these files (which might contain human made errors) and combines all of that data into an enhanced and responsive report.

Do you know how much a human made error could cost your company? All it takes is placing a comma or a decimal point in the wrong place to make a serious marginal error. Or if someone were to file the wrong information under the wrong date, just think of the consequences. Some errors just aren’t worth taking the risk for.

Business intelligence isn’t just about being in the know, it’s about having a competitive advantage over your competitors and knowing things they don’t about your audience.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ivan Widjaya

Ivan Widjaya is the Founder/CEO of online marketing agency Previso Media and the Owner of SMBCEO.com, as well as several other business blogs/online magazines. He is a Web publisher, Web property investor, blogger and Web property builder.

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2 Comments →The Top Three Benefits from Using Business Intelligence Software

While I can appreciate the value of descriptive operational reporting in enterprise, the true value of business intelligence (BI) software does not begin to shine until one migrates from descriptive intelligence into predictive and prescriptive intelligence. The cost of BI software must go well beyond reporting current states. Thank you for the opportunity to comment.